They are angry when they walk, tuning out the ambient voice of the city, tuning out the world, with their portable electronics, that they cram into their ears, or clamp over their heads, which makes it look as if, they are wearing earmuffs, even in one-hundred-degree weather, filling their heads with, whatever echo chamber they have chosen, one that reinforces their beliefs, or their lack of belief, and with complete indifference, to the others around them, never saying hello or hello back, to the friendly passersby, but always ready to shout, at the guy on the bicycle, who was yelling out to them, lookout! as they step off the curb and into the crosswalk, often against the traffic signal.
They are angry when they drive, on the boulevard, on the highway, and on the interstate, speeding and tailgating, and running red lights, and cutting people off, while they smoke their dope and pop their pills, and sometimes they kill people, because they felt wronged by the person, that flipped them off because of their reckless driving, or who were actually driving the speed limit, or just because they are running behind schedule, and in a hurry to pick up their children from school, or to pick up their Shih Tzu at the groomer before they close shop, or to get to their therapists office on time, to work on that anger problem.
They are angry at the supermarket, often acting like the drivers, grabby, sullen, and impatient, as you take the time to check the ripeness of a watermelon, or checking the expiration date on a piece of meat, or checking the milk carton, to see if you recognize, the missing child printed on it, or writing out a check for your groceries, or ordering a sandwich at the deli counter, and they are often guilty of blocking an aisle, and they get all bent out of shape, when you politely ask them to move their cart, as if the request was the equivalent, of asking them, to move a mountain, and they are often guilty of having, more than fifteen items in the express checkout line, because they are selfish, inconsiderate jerks.
They are angry at the airport, which should be a happy place, because they are taking a trip somewhere, and they argue with the attendant checking in their bags, who needs to charge an extra fee, because their bag is overweight, much like themselves, and they argue with the TSA when they try to get through security, with more than 3.4-ounces of anything, like their ridiculous 32-ounce Stanley tumbler that is full of water, or perhaps vodka, that they have to dump out, and they get surly with their fellow passengers who hold up the line, to take all of 5-seconds, to put their carry-on into the overhead bin.
All of these angry men and women, walking and driving and shopping and traveling, make this a dangerous city to live in, because it is never certain what will make them snap, or when they will snap, but when they do, you will hear about the insanity on the local evening news, who will get the facts of the story mostly right, or on the social media platforms, where facts are apparently situational, and often substituted for belief, or conspiracies, and you will see ten different storylines, from ten different influencers, about the exact same event, the majority of which are opinions, and not actual news, and certainly not actual journalism.
I have decided not to get caught up in it, caught up in the urban-borne anger of the others, the anger bubbling just below the surface, the anger that is ready to be unleashed, at the mere whiff, of an inconvenience, or a perceived disrespect, but will instead remind myself, that there are happy people, somewhere in this city, that there are kind people, somewhere in this city, that there are good people, somewhere in this city, but they all must be sought out, because they are nowhere in plain sight.
I’m an unabashed Libertarian and have bones to pick with both the Democrats and the Republicans for all sorts of anti-freedom and anti-liberty policies. See my Politically Homeless post for some background on this.
Unless you have been living under a rock or are perhaps in solitary confinement in a foreign prison somewhere outside of the United States, you’ve heard of DOGE: The Department of Government Efficiency, which I’ll summarize thusly:
DOGE was created by an executive order from Donald Trump, a polarizing figure.
DOGE is managed by Elon Musk, a controversial super-genius level billionaire.
DOGE is acting as a consultancy to the Trump administration.
DOGE is reviled by many pundits, politicos, and media types.
Meme coin and Shiba Inu references aside, DOGE has become a lightning rod of controversy right out of the gate. Elon Musk is notable for his pragmatic approach to solving problems and distilling them down to their essential components, and stripping away any unnecessary elements. He’s very good at it. So, why not take this same practical approach to government spending to uncover any potential corruption, wasteful spending, fraud, overspending, ineptitude, redundancy, etc.? So what if he’s an outsider without any political experience? DOGE is about efficiency, not glad-handing or bashing the opposing political party and their policies and supporters at every opportunity.
Granted, Musk’s approach may seem as if the tool of choice is a machete instead of a scalpel, but I would argue that there is room for both and maybe a chainsaw too. For example, maybe use a scalpel for entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare, and the Department of Defense, but use a machete (or a chainsaw!) for everything else.
Have you ever looked at how many US government programs and agencies that there are? According to usa.gov, which, inconveniently, does not summarize how many there are on the landing page, so you have to count through them manually from A-Z, there are approximately 607 of them. SIX HUNDRED AND SEVEN! I’m no expert here, but that seems like a lot and is probably too many. Do we really need the National Gallery of Art whose statement is, “The National Gallery of Art collects, preserves and exhibits art works, and works to promote the understanding of art through research and educational programs.” Seems like museums, universities, or the private sector can handle that, you know, the super wealthy people that collect and sell art. Or perhaps Sotheby’s.
How about the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA), whose statement is, “The United States Fire Administration (USFA), part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, works to prepare for, prevent, respond to all hazards.” Respond to all hazards seems like a stretch. Do we actually need federal fire fighters? I’m thinking absolutely not because firefighting is a very local state, county, and city service, some of which are voluntary, and so the feds should not be involved at all unless they want to donate a firetruck.
For the sake of argument, out of those 607 federal departments and agencies that spend nearly $7 trillion tax dollars per year, can’t we all agree that they should at least be audited like what Deloitte or PricewaterhouseCoopers do for Fortune 500 companies to ensure that the books are on the up and up and nothing fishy is going on? Oh, that’s right, best practice accounting is anathema to government. But it does seem that Mr. Musk is highly likely to find all kinds of efficiencies to be had across the board. But maybe the politicians really don’t care about efficiency at all and categorically do not want him to be checking the books or poking around for fraud, corruption, and waste (the evil trinity of the federal government) because the truth might slip out. Truth like the American taxpayers have been fooled into trusting the politicians with their hard-earned money, and the politicians have known about the fraud, corruption, and waste the entire time. “Nothing to see here!” Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
My intuition tells me that the nervous pants-on-fire politicians who aren’t positive that they’ll survive the scrutiny of an audit and their big media sycophants will portray Musk as evil and will stonewall him at every turn and clog up the judicial system with lawsuits challenging everything that Musk wants to do which will grind DOGE to a halt. Unfortunately, it’s all part of the dog-eared political playbook.
If the collective belief of the American taxpayer is that we’re all getting ripped off by the government all of the time and at all levels and it is absolutely corrupt (which should be the default attitude anyway), and the government provides sub-par services to the people they, ah, serve, doesn’t the government have the obligation to prove otherwise in the spirit of transparency? Well, I think so…but they won’t do it voluntarily, so someone needs to force their hand. That’s why we need DOGE.
I also want to see DOGE applied to the state, county, and city government levels too. I’m pretty sure taxpayers are getting ripped off left-and-right there too, especially here in Los Angeles where city hall is a cesspool of corruption and contempt.
I’m going to take the opportunity here to float out my six-step idea called FERRET:
Freeze the program budget.
Examine the program from the top down.
Reform the program.
Restrain the program.
Eject and prosecute anyone that is guilty of corruption or fraud.
Transparency across the board in perpetuity.
I say we FERRET governments everywhere all of the time.
I also strongly recommend that we put governments on the blockchain so anyone can see all of the transactions at any time. Yeah, I know – wishful thinking – but it would be the closest thing to a truth machine that we can get without it being science fiction.
Before living through it (twice in two different houses) I really didn’t believe in ghosts. Actual street addresses in the following story are withheld to respect the privacy of the current owners.
The first haunted house that I lived in was in, Pasadena, CA. It was a 1-story 3+1 California craftsman home built in 1922. My mom, my older sister Lisa, my younger brother Scott, and I moved in with the Dubuque family after my parents divorced in 1972. This is one of those cool old homes with a big front porch and a subterranean cellar with double doors, similar to the one in Dorothy Gale’s Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s farmhouse in rural Kansas in the movie The Wizard of Oz.
Nancy Dubuque warned us early on about their ghostly resident that lived in the attic. The ghost was described as “A friendly old man” that died in the house. She also said that we might hear the following sounds emanating from the attic, and not to be alarmed:
Pacing footsteps.
A creaking rocking chair.
A rolling marble.
Okay, so being an 11-year-old boy, this ghost, and noises in the attic business kind of freaked me out. The Dubuque’s, however, had apparently accepted the otherworldly spirit as part of the history of the house and its earthly residents went about living there like it was no big deal.
My first encounter with the presence of the spirit happened while I was sitting in the large living room in the evening by myself and reading, believe it or not, a worn-out copy of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. I know; this is heady stuff for such a young boy, but I loved reading whatever I could get my hands on, and the book cover with the image of the black bird intrigued me.
I don’t recall where everyone else was at the time, but I do remember that it was quiet; so quiet that In the midst of reading one of the passages in the poem, I heard the distinct sound of creaky footsteps walking across the attic. This made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up, and I slammed the book shut and ran off to find my siblings. I never told anyone about it.
The second time I encountered the presence of the spirit was when I wasn’t feeling well and was lying on my mom’s bed in the front bedroom staring at the ceiling in an almost meditative state. It was late at night and everyone else was asleep. That’s when I noticed the creaking rocking chair sound directly above me. It was faint at first, and slowly increased in intensity. This too, freaked me out at first, but I decided to interpret it as a sign that the nice grandfatherly old man in the attic was concerned about me and was watching over me from his rocking chair. I felt his presence and took comfort in it. I chose not to be scared about it. I never told anyone about this either but I never actually saw an apparition while living there.
I suppose that it could have been a much worse haunting, like poltergeist level worse, but over time, I too accepted the spirit as part of the house. We only lived there for about one school year before moving to North Hollywood.
Fast-forward 8-years, and I found myself living in a Spanish-Mediterranean hillside house in Glendale, CA that was built around 1925. I shared the house with two friends named Danny Lord and Mike Anderson. There was a tiled mural in glazed hand painted Spanish tile just inside the front door with the name Machu Picchu and a depiction of the legendary terraced citadel. It was built on a 2-level terraced floor plan taking advantage of the steep hillside lot.
At street level was the top level of the house that included a one-car, partially attached garage, a large living room with a vaulted, exposed beam ceiling and a fireplace, a large patio deck with three double hung French doors, a galley style kitchen, and a large dining room. At the end of the kitchen was a walk-through pantry that had a side door that led to a small sidewalk between the house and the garage. From the sidewalk you could enter the garage from a side door or walk out to the street. There was a wrought iron staircase from the living room that went down to the lower level.
The lower level had a short hallway with three large bedrooms branching off, one laundry room, and one large full bathroom. There was also a glass door at one end of the hallway that led to a flight of stairs that went down to a small outside patio area.
It was actually a pretty cool bachelor house. We had many parties and good times while living there.
Danny was the one who found the house in the Los Angeles Times classified section and contacted the owners about renting it. This is when the owners disclosed that the house was haunted and why the rent was lower than similar houses in the area. So, the three of us moved into a low-rent haunted house – what could go wrong with that? Plenty, as we were to find out.
The story behind this haunted house was that around 1930, a 5-year-old girl died from an exploding boiler tank that was formerly located in the laundry room. My bedroom happened to be directly adjacent to the laundry room.
Per the owners disclosure, the spirit of the little girl was known to do the following:
Turn on sink faucets.
Open and close doors.
Turn lights on and off.
I was working in the electrical trade at the time and always had early hours during the week, generally, up by 5:00 AM and out of the door by 6:00 AM. I was always up before Danny and Mike every weekday.
One early weekday morning shortly after we had moved in, I went upstairs for coffee and a bagel. I noticed a cold draft as I was ascending the stairs and it was when I turned toward the kitchen that I noticed that one set of the double hung French doors were wide open. I was certain that Mike or Danny left them open from the night before when they went out on the patio to smoke a cigarette.
When I got home, I told the guys about it and reminded them to close the doors. They both looked at me as if I had two heads and said that neither of them were on the patio the night before. It was at this point that we all looked at each other and realized that this nocturnal activity was from our resident of the spiritual world. We laughed it off.
Every now and then as I was walking to my bedroom, there was a distinct cold spot in the hallway near the laundry room. This was obviously another sign that there was a spirit in the house. I’ve often wondered if the cold spot was a portal for our ghostly resident.
One night we had a few friends over and were hanging out in the living room listening to records and drinking beer and smoking some weed and talking. Suddenly, the living room lights went off. I said, “Very funny Danny.” Danny said, “I’m over here, Kent,” from the dining room, and he (nor anyone else) was anywhere near the switch for the living room lights. We all looked at each other and had a collective freak-out moment after realizing that our ghostly resident had made her presence felt again. Admittedly, it was a very creepy feeling.
Over the following months we encountered many more of the open patio door events, sometimes it was the side door, and various lights turning on or off, and occasionally a running bathroom faucet.
But one event stood out as the most chilling of them all…
One Saturday night, we had a few friends over to pre-game before heading to the Starwood nightclub in West Hollywood to see a concert of a local band and someone in our group knew the lead guitar player. There were six of us in total – three men and three women. We drank a little. We smoked a little. We listened to a little music. Collectively, we were feeling pretty damn good.
As the string of us were leaving the house through the kitchen to the side door, the lights went off. The girls were sure that we were trying to spook them, but as we were groping our way in the dark to find the light switch, we all sensed that someone had rushed past us…and then the side door flew open without anyone near it. The girls screamed. The guys screamed. And now we were all spooked out of our minds. An otherworldly presence was felt by everyone, though there was no appearance of an apparition.
We all piled into Danny’s 1974 Pontiac Firebird and headed to the Starwood. For the first 15-minutes of the drive, nobody talked about what happened at Machu Picchu. Then one of the girls asked, “Do you really think it was the ghost?” This opened up an entire conversation about it.
When we got back to the house after the concert and asked the girls to come in, there was an awkward hesitation, and then came the excuses. “I have to get back home to let my dog out.” “I have to get up early for work.” “I have to be back to my apartment by 1:00 or my roommate will lock me out.” I think the truth was that they did not want to step foot into our creepy haunted house on the hill. I can’t say that I blame them.
We did not move out of the house because of the ghost. We eventually moved out due to the circumstances of life, money, jobs, and personal relationships. We all remained friends but went our separate ways before the first year was out.
Ghosts are a complicated topic because they validate the world of spirits. And if there is a world of spirits, this validates that there is an afterlife of some sort. If there is an afterlife, does this also mean that there is a heaven and hell? If so, this also means that God and Jesus Christ are not fictional characters. If God and Jesus are not fictional characters, it means that the bible is true. If the bible is true, I may be on the road to hell. I should probably work on this. Also, if the bible is true and God exists, I have questions. Questions like, “God, why did you create the mosquito? What purpose does it serve other than to spread diseases (that you also presumably created) that kill people in some of the most agonizing, horrific ways possible?” Questions like this flood my mind. This is my Pandora’s box.
Anyway, to add other credibility to this matter of spirituality, I had a near-death experience in 1994 from an electrical accident which I recently wrote about in a post titled, Anniversary of a Near-Death Experience. At some point I lost consciousness and I saw the white light. I was floating. The last thing I remembered thinking to myself immediately before hitting the floor and regaining consciousness was, “I can’t go; my wife and kids need me. I can’t go.
Even with this evidence of a spiritual world, I’m still very conflicted about this biblical heaven and hell stuff because I really don’t believe that a righteous God wants children to suffer.
L.A. Times newspaper clipping from March 25, 1979.
Story 22 of 52
By M. Snarky
In light of the birthday of Eddie Van Halen on January 26, I wanted to share my story of how I got to see Eddie and the boys play at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1979.
In 1978 I was a skinny seventeen-year-old skateboarding weed-smoking hard-rocking smart-ass white boy from The Valley – the best-known suburb north of Los Angeles. The soundtrack at the time was Corporate Rock, Disco, New Wave, and burgeoning Punk Rock. Bands like Boston, Foreigner, Journey, Bee Gees, Abba, and The Village People dominated mainstream FM radio airplay. This was the height of the Disco Scare.
L.A. based FM rock stations KLOS and KMET played a steady diet of Corporate Rock and mixed in some hard rock staples like AC/DC, Aerosmith, and Led Zeppelin and the usual 60’s rock bands and artists like Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but overall, the music was starting to feel stale. KROQ in Pasadena was the only L.A. FM station that was playing anything with a new sound, like Talking Heads, The Specials, U2, and The Clash – but I wasn’t ready for them…yet.
One spring day while listening to KLOS, I heard a cover song of The Kinks You Really Got Me by a band I’d never heard of: Van Halen. I knew at that moment that this Van Halen guy on the guitar was an instant legend. He was coaxing sounds out of his guitar that no one had ever imagined let alone heard – with rapid-fire harmonics, fret-tapping, sliding, bending, riffing, and shredding on what seemed impossible 1/64th notes. My friends and I didn’t find out until later after we bought the self-titled Van Halen album that Van Halen was Eddie and Alex’s last name, but that didn’t matter because we knew who we were talkin’ ‘bout…and so did everyone else.
The moment anyone heard Van Halen in ‘78 knew that the rock & roll landscape had experienced a paradigm shift and was irrevocably altered seemingly overnight and forever. And although Eddie Van Halen’s innovative playing style was copied by countless others, it was never fully replicated because Eddie was the true Chosen One. The buzz was that Eddie saved rock & roll by altering what’s possible with an electric guitar.
The debut album titled, Van Halen, colloquially known as Van Halen I, was an immediate success and it got mega airplay throughout the year. Songs like Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love, Runnin’ with the Devil, and Jamie’s Cryin’ were heard everywhere. ‘78 was a good summer for rock & roll fans. Most of my rocker friends and I bought the album and the first time we listened to Eruption, which wasn’t getting any airplay at the time, we knew we were hearing greatness – Eddie Van Halen was the Jimi Hendrix of our generation.
Sometime early in ‘79, KMET started promoting the CaliFFornia [sic] World Music Festival for Wolf and Rissmiller Concerts. The concert was scheduled for April 7-8, 1979, at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum and Van Halen was one of the bands in the lineup. I absolutely had to go see these guys live and on-stage. This was pre-Internet, so if you wanted to get tickets to a concert, you had to go to the venue’s box office or find a ticket outlet like Ticketron somewhere in the city and stand and wait in line at Tower Records or Sears and hope and pray that the concert didn’t sell out before you got to the counter. I skateboarded over to my local Ticketron from my apartment in North Hollywood (now referred to as “NoHo”) and at the time it was located inside the Sears department store at Valley Plaza which was located at the intersection of Victory and Laurel Canyon Boulevards, only about 2-miles from where I was living. General Admission tickets went for $15, and the concert was billed as “Rain or Shine.”
Van Halen was playing on the second day of the festival, Sunday, April 8, and the band line up for that day were:
Aerosmith
Van Halen
UFO
Toto
Mother’s Finest
Eddie Money
April Wine
Boomtown Rats
Brownsville
All to be hosted by Cheech & Chong! Not too shabby of a lineup for a young rock & roll fan like me.
In March of ‘79, just two-weeks before the concert, the album Van Halen II was released and it was getting mega airplay too with new songs like Beautiful Girls, Dance the Night Away, and Bottoms Up! It was another fantastic album by those hard rocking’ Dutch dudes, and I was very happy that they weren’t a one-off band.
The concert at the Coliseum was “festival seating,” meaning, first-come-first served, so my friends and I decided to drive down to the Coliseum the night before the concert to get in line to make sure we could get in early on Sunday to get a good spot in front of the stage.
When we got there, Ted Nugent was wrapping up his set with Motor City Madhouse, and, well, it was a madhouse. 65,000 or so screaming fans inside the Coliseum and thousands more hanging around outside. When the concert ended and the people started streaming out, it was a massive flood of humanity!
For us, it was a night full of partying and carousing and nobody got much sleep. Everything was getting passed around – from weed to cocaine to tequila to god only knows what else. Nobody was saying, “No, no thank you.” It was pretty much YES, YES, THANK YOU! The LAPD was present, but fortunately, they weren’t harassing anyone for partying.
Someone in line next to us broke out a fresh deck of cards and an impromptu round of Blackjack-on-the-sidewalk began. People were betting whatever they had on them whether it was cash, weed, pills of all colors shapes and sizes, or a vial of cocaine. Winning a round of cards was also scoring! I didn’t have much cash and was never lucky in cards, so I just watched in amusement. As the wee hours of the morning approached, we slept a little bit sitting on the sidewalk with our backs against the chain-link fencing that surrounded the perimeter of the Coliseum.
As daylight approached, we were hungry for breakfast, so we pooled our money together and had someone walk over to a local McDonalds a few blocks away for some coffee and Egg McMuffins which were only like 85-cents each. The other people in line were very jealous when the coffee and hot food showed up!
By now it was close to 7:00 AM which was the time when the gates were supposed to open. People started stirring around and standing up in line but there were a lot of people that were still sleeping or passed out lying on the sidewalk. The first band wasn’t scheduled to start playing until noon, so we had plenty of time to get a good spot and settle in.
Fortunately, we were only a couple hundred people back from the front of our line at one of the many entry gates and knew that we made the right choice coming the night before, but by now, the line that we were standing in snaked around the Coliseum and people spilled out onto Exposition Park Drive.
When the gates finally opened, there was a bit of a rush and people started pushing and shoving and cutting in line. causing a bit of a ruckus. We avoided getting into the mix by going around it and as we briskly walked down the tunnel toward the field, we realized that we were amongst the first couple of thousand people to get in – we could get front-and-center of the stage! Awesome! But it was only like 7:30 AM by this time and there was a long way to go before Van Halen took the stage. We put our blankets out on the grass far enough back where we had a perfect view of the stage and kicked back for a bit.
However, as the day progressed and more people came in, we had to stand up to see the stage and soon people were standing on our blankets, and we were getting further and further compressed into the crowd. By the time Toto started playing at around 3:00, we had had enough of the crowd and headed up to the seats. Fortunately, there were still decent seats available, and we found ourselves to the left of the stage around the 50-yard line at mid-level up around the 222 section.
Toto finished their set and left the stage at around 4:00 and while UFO was getting set up, the largest scale food fight I’d ever witnessed happened and it went something like this; a group of people to my right from the back of the crowd on the grass field started throwing trash toward the people in front of them. The people in front retreated toward the stage and when the assailants ran out of trash to throw, the former victims counterattacked and grabbed the same trash and advanced and threw all the trash toward the back. The people in the back retreated and then raided some more trash cans and moved forward again with another aerial assault. This went back-and-forth for a while – I’m talking about thousands of people here – and this left-to-right and right-to-left movement of people with trash flying through the air had us mesmerized.
After about half an hour of this back-and-forth, someone on the PA system finally asked the crowd to stop throwing trash, and they fortunately complied with the request. I’m just glad that we weren’t caught up in it. Trash was strewn everywhere plus a few fights broke out – what a fucking mess! On the other hand, it had been over 24-hours since our last shower so maybe the smell of garbage to the people sitting around us would’ve been an improvement over our, um, musk?
Finally, at around 7:30 PM Van Halen took the stage. We sparked up a fattie as David Lee Roth strutted out wearing suspenders and a pair of white gloves and was holding a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and his mic in the other and he addressed the audience with something like, “How y’all doin’ tonight?” It felt like the entire stadium erupted into cheering and clapping. We knew at that moment that we were in for a fantastic performance and man-oh-man; did they deliver the goods!
Between Eddie’s soaring, rapid-fire, precise, shredding guitar licks and David Lee Roth’s vocals and impressive gymnastic moves, it was truly an electrifying performance. Women were throwing their undergarments on the stage! Eddie was smiling the entire performance and he had the crowd eating out of his hands and he was loving it! These guys were young but were already polished showmen and they knew it. They were entertaining, exciting, charismatic, engaging, and full of swagger and boundless energy.
The setlist, according to concertarchives.org for the show was:
Light Up the Sky
Somebody Get Me a Doctor
Drum Solo
Runnin’ With the Devil
Dance the Night Away
Beautiful Girls
On Fire
Bass Solo
You’re No Good
Jamie’s Cryin’
Feel Your Love Tonight
Outta Love Again
Ice Cream Man
Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love
Guitar Solo
You Really Got Me
Bottoms Up! (encore)
Eddie’s guitar solo was simply epic – a mash-up of Eruption and some guitar licks from other well-known rock songs but with Eddie’s matchless style and interpretations. Eddie proved without a shadow of a doubt that he was a true virtuoso, and he was the new master of the electric guitar. He absolutely rocked the Coliseum and blew the crowd of 65,000 people away with his incredible musicianship!
By the time Van Halen finished their encore, the crowd was exhausted, but they wanted more; the cheering for another encore went on even while the roadies started taking down the equipment!
Even though the concert was 45-years ago, it seems like only yesterday. To this day, this remains the best live band I’ve ever seen, and I’ll always look back fondly at the experience. I never had the chance to see Van Halen play again because, well, life happens, but that performance left an indelible impression upon me that I’ll never forget.
Of course, Van Halen was an integral part of the soundtrack of many more summers to come.
When I heard the news of Eddie Van Halen’s death on October 6, 2020, I was dumbfounded and didn’t want to believe it. I kept thinking back to this concert and how invincible he seemed. Yes, I know that even Rock Gods must die, but it was too soon for Eddie. Also, fuck cancer!! Much love and respect to Valerie and Wolfgang for their loss.
Godspeed, Eddie. You left behind an incredible musical legacy here on earth and I hope you find a heavenly guitar shop where you can painlessly play and tinker on guitars in peace for eternity. Rock-on! \m/
Of course, after writing this, I had to listen to the OG album Van Halen I. It still holds up well.
Mulholland Drive between Coldwater Canyon to the west and Laurel Canyon to the right.
By M. Snarky
Story 20 of 52
A mecca for car and motorcycle enthusiasts, Mulholland Drive between Coldwater Canyon Avenue and Laurel Canyon Boulevard was a place to test your driving or motorcycle riding skills. It was also a place where death was always possible at every turn.
I have driven on this section of Mulholland drive more times than I can remember, sometimes as a driver or motorcycle rider, and sometimes as a passenger. It is an infamous 2.25 mile stretch of road for many reasons. It is a road where you might test out the new suspension mods you just installed on your car. It is a road where you might take your significant other to view the city lights from one of the many fantastic lookouts. However, this is an unforgiving stretch of road and if you make a mistake, you may find yourself plunging hundreds of feet down a steep hillside and you are not likely to survive.
Some of the turns even have names, like Deadman’s Turn, Carl’s Curve and Grandstands, all of which have proven to be fatal at one time or another over the decades. This is part of the allure of Mulholland Drive; to push the driving envelope and beat death by hitting every twisting turn as fast as possible. Or not.
At the bottom of the gully at Car’s Curve you can find cars from all of the decades piled up. It is rumored that this part of Mulholland Drive is haunted by the drivers who were killed there. I came close to crashing there a few times myself.
I almost crashed on Alan Flaata’s café style 1973 Yamaha RD350 on Dead Man’s Curve – a nasty, almost 90-degree turn. If you’re coming from Laurel Canyon Boulevard, it turns hard to the left and comes up right after about a one-eighth mile straight section where you can pick up a lot of speed…if you’re willing…and I was. I came into that turn going much too fast and as I was downshifting and braking hard and leaning hard and trying to pull the motorcycle hard to the left, the left side foot peg scraped the asphalt and almost high-sided me right over the edge of the curve and down into the canyon. I barely pulled it off. I also almost soiled my new 501’s.
When I thought I was a great driver in my late teens and early twenties – like all young men that age believe – I was always pushing the envelope on Mulholland Drive in whatever car I was driving, which translates into I was almost always crashing all of the time…but I got lucky and never did actually crash, although I came very close. This is why that road is so dangerous; you build up a false sense of world-class driving skills when you’re driving hard and don’t crash, and so you keep on pushing the limit. It is a vicious circle.
Here’s my list of all the spinout survivor cars that I almost crashed on that stretch of road:
1973 BMW 2002 with a 4-speed manual transmission and a heavily modified engine with dual, side draft Weber carburetors, headers, and a lowered suspension kit with anti-sway bars and Koni shocks and springs, and flared fenders with fat Pirelli tires. A true Eurocar experience. This car belonged to Frenchman Robert Gabbay, one of my old European Motor Connection bosses.
1978 Fiat X1/9, stock, with a 5-speed manual transmission. A lightweight mid-engine car that handled pretty good and was fun to drive. This was a European Motor Connection customer car that I had for the weekend.
1982 Chevy Citation X-11 5-speed coupe, stock. This was mine. It had decent power and handled well, but the front-wheel-drive transverse transaxle drivetrain was a little heavy to steer.
1976 Jensen Interceptor III, stock. Another European Motor Connection customer car that I thrashed a few times.
1969 Chevy Chevelle Super Sport 396, this was my $400 beater car that I bought from Keith Doran. Primer gray, no heater, no AC, no frills – just a shell of its former self. Somewhere along the line, someone swapped out the 396 for a 350! What a knucklehead.
Out of all of these cars, the Chevelle was the dumbest car to race around on Mulholland Drive because it simply was not built for handling and was notorious for massive understeer and crappy braking. It also only had a 2-speed “Slip ‘n’ Slide” PowerGlide transmission. Ah, youthful exuberance!
Some of these spinouts happened during the day, and some happened at nighttime, which is a very different experience when you’re spinning out; one second you see the rocky face of the road cut, and the next second you see the oncoming traffic, and the next second you see the city lights. With sweaty palms and an adrenaline surge, you drive off as if nothing had happened.
Around the summer of 1979 or so, my crazy friend Mark Flaata, Alan Flaata’s older brother, borrowed his mom’s dark green fake wood paneled 1972 Chrysler Town and Country station wagon one night and picked me up. As we were driving up to Mulholland Drive from Coldwater Canyon, we smoked a little bit of weed and were blasting Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love on 95.5 KLOS. We were feeling alright, and when Mark turned left onto Mulholland Drive, he apparently started channeling Björn Waldegård, the 1979 World Rally champion, and opened up the 4-barrel carburetor on the 383 cubic inch engine and got that massive station wagon a little bit sideways. Mark drove like a maniac, sliding around the curves, and flooring it every chance he could. We were laughing our asses off as Mark was thrashing his mom’s poor car.
Up ahead, Mark saw a hitchhiker and decided to stop and give him a ride. I was thinking that picking up a hitchhiker on Mulholland Drive at night might be a really bad idea, but the guy from Reno turned out to be pretty cool and was trying to get to Hollywood and Vine. Mark said, “No problem; I’ll drive you there!” Then Mark drove off like a nut job, spinning his wheels in the dirt and speeding off and sliding around more turns. I looked back at the guy from Reno, and he looked like he wanted to barf or maybe jump out of the car. Well, as Mark sped into one of the unnamed right-hand curves near Laurel Pass Avenue, he lost control, and we slid sideways left off of the pavement and into the slightly bermed dirt hillside – almost rolling that gigantic mass of Detroit steel in the process – as it stalled and came to rest on top of a huge hard-packed mound of dirt.
Approximate crash site.
This is when the guy from Reno said, “Hey man, thanks for the ride, but I think I’ll walk the rest of the way.” Mark replied, “Don’t worry, dude, I’ll get you to Hollywood!” as he quickly restarted the Chrysler and tried to drive it off the mound of dirt that it found itself sitting on, but all that happened was spinning wheels – the massive, 4,735 lb., 121-inch-long wheelbase station wagon was stuck, looking something like a beached mechanical whale. We got out of the car to assess the situation. The frame of the station wagon was sitting on the crest of the hard-packed dirt mound and was practically teetering. We knew our only option was to bumper jack it up from the front until the back wheels were firmly touching the ground for traction, and then reverse it out as the car would, theoretically anyway, gracefully roll backwards off of the jack.
This is when we noticed that the man from Reno was gone; he had pulled off a proper Irish Goodbye and we never saw him again. Hopefully he got to Hollywood in one piece. I’m 100% sure Mark left an impression.
Being that the car was on a slight slope, it took a few attempts to get the bumper jack to stabilize using some strategically placed rocks, but it actually worked on the fist attempt. By the time we were done, we were covered in dust, dirt and sweat but remarkably, aside from the layer of dust and dirt also on the station wagon, it was unscathed: no dents, no scratches, no flat tires, no cracked windshield, proving once again that the car was pretty much invincible. In retrospect, it could have been a massively worse crash and we were lucky that we didn’t get hurt or killed.
There are many spots along that stretch of Mulholland Drive that you can pull off and park and watch the motorcycle riders and car enthusiasts – even the boneheaded ones that borrowed their mothers station wagon, ahem – test their mettle. On any given weekend, you’d see early and late model European cars like BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, Alpha-Romeo, and my personal favorite, Porsche. Most of these cars looked original, but many of them were modified for road racing. Occasionally you would witness a spinout or someone driving off the asphalt and onto the soft dirt shoulder kicking up a huge cloud of dust.
Less crazy Alan Flaata had a heavily modified 1972 Ford Capri that he raced around on Mulholland Drive too, but Alan definitely had much better driving skills than Mark. I know this because I was a passenger in that car when he drove through Griffith Park as fast as he could on Mt Hollywood Drive, colloquially known as Trash Truck Hill. Alan spent many weekends wrenching on his beloved Capri road racer, and I think he spent most of the money he earned from working at Oroweat Bakery on aftermarket parts. Alan was an early adopter of the “Built not bought” movement. His friend Mauricio Zotto followed suit, but “Zotto” built a badass 1970 Boss 302 Mustang that he could pull a slight wheelie with that he raced on Van Nuys Boulevard in the heyday of Wednesday night cruising. But that’s another story.
I’m not talking about trophy wife robots here; I’m talking about modern-day car bumpers.
A few years back I was rear-ended on the eternally godawful I-405 south. It was 5-MPH bumper-to-bumper morning traffic. I was driving a 2012 Honda Ridgeline. She was driving a BMW 3-Series. There was more damage to her car than my truck. The young woman who hit me was very apologetic and polite. The rear bumper had a few scrapes and a gouge and was slightly dented inward. We pulled over to the right shoulder and exchanged information and went about our business.
I took my truck to a well-respected repair shop – the kind where they replace broken parts with OEM parts – for an estimate. They told me they had to break down the bumper to check for internal damage, so I had to leave it for a day. Bumpers with internal damage already concerned me.
The $3,600 cost for the repair left me gasping for air. This was basically 2-months’ of mortgage payments! The short, line-item estimate went something like this:
Bumper skin
Foam core
Mounting brackets
Mounting clips
Primer paint
OEM color matched paint
Clear coat
Labor
Why does it cost almost four grand to replace what is seemingly a cheap plastic-skinned styrofoam-cored bumper? Manufacturing the replacement parts can’t be that expensive! And why does it wrap around from wheel well to wheel well anyway? The car manufacturers will tell you that it’s a safety feature; that the bumpers are essentially sacrificial to prevent further, more expensive damage to the frame, radiator, etc. I think they intentionally integrated the headlights, electronics, and grille into the entire assembly too so that a minor fender bender has a major repair cost.
But what if the manufacturers actually conspired with the sacrificial wrap around bumper design to maximize minor collision repair costs and the “safety feature” language is just a steaming pile of PR BS?
OR is it that the car manufacturers are sticking it to the insurance companies who ultimately pay for the repairs?
Either way, we are getting royally screwed.
I believe that we are being duped by BIG CARMA and I demand Congress to investigate!
December 26, 2024. Yesterday marked the 30th anniversary of an industrial accident that almost killed me. According to the ER doctor at Providence Saint Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank CA, it should have killed me.
I was working as a Journeyman in the electrical trade at the time, and the contractor I was working for landed a job for some tenant improvement (TI) work on the 6th floor of the DIC Enterprises building. It was a relatively simple job; relocate some 3-way light switches in the file room from one of the existing doorways that was going to be removed and closed off and move the switches to a new doorway location that was cut in on an adjacent wall. In the trade, this was typical, benign TI work that I had done hundreds of times before.
A 3-way switch means that there are two switch locations where the lights can be turned on or off as you enter or exit a room, generally, on opposite sides of a room.
Also typical was that this was a commercial office building with a 480-volt 3-phase wye alternating current power supply that utilized 277-volt A, B, and C phases for the lighting circuits. Yeah, that’s right kids: 277-volts from one leg (one wire) of the wye. This is common, industrial strength power here in the US and it must be handled with great respect, or it will unceremoniously kill you.
The 12-foot high suspended 2-by-2 acoustic t-bar ceiling of this room was also typical of a commercial office building. It’s one of those ceilings with 2-foot square drop-in tiles and a metal t-bar grid to hold them in place. The t-bar grid also holds the lighting fixtures in place. Everything is held and tied together with #10 or #12 tie wire where one end is tied off to the t-bar, and the other end is tied off to an eyebolt or a bracket that is fastened to the metal decking or concrete building structure above. Light fixtures have additional #8 or #10 self-tapping sheet metal screws that fasten them to the t-bar. All in the name of seismic safety.
I was working with an apprentice named Miguel. In trade parlance, he was “green,” meaning inexperienced – he only had a couple of years under his belt. But Miguel was a quick learner and we got along well.
I proceeded to do the investigative pre-work. This consisted of identifying the line side conduit which is the conduit that contains the “feeder” wires – a.k.a., “hot side” – of the circuit, and then identifying the load side conduit which is the conduit that connects to the lighting.
I won’t bore you with the details, but both switch conduits connected to a common junction-box (j-box) above the ceiling, and the feeder side was at the switch that was not being relocated. Easy-peasy: remove both switches, open the wiring on the feeder side switch and cap it off, pull out some wiring, cut in a new switch box, drop in a new conduit, pull in new wiring, make appropriate splices and pigtails, reinstall switches. Done.
During a critical part of the work, I had instructed Miguel not to splice and pigtail either switch until I was done with working with the j-box in the ceiling, which was sandwiched between an air duct and the t-bar, and I only had about 6-inches of space to work with. Well, apparently the part about not splicing did not get through, and Miguel energized the circuit anyway…and me along with it.
I was standing on the 9th rung of a 10-foot ladder and was leaning heavily into one of the 2-by-2 openings to access the j-box, partially resting my arms on the metal t-bar. I am always careful when I’m doing make-up work, which is trade slang for stripping and splicing wiring, however, you handle the make-up work differently if you know you are working on a hot circuit. Well, I did not know I was working on a hot circuit until I was stripping a wire and the finger of my right hand was touching the exposed metal of my wire stripping tool. This now made me part of the circuit, and the 277-volts flowed through my body because my arms were grounded to the t-bar ceiling.
Being that your muscles work with small electrical currents that are controlled by your brain, when higher voltage goes through your body, your muscles contract violently. I was situated in such a way that when my muscles contracted, I lifted myself off of the ladder and suspended my body by my arms and the pain from this hyper-contraction of my muscles was unbelievable.
Oddly, even though I was aware that I was being electrocuted, I could still think clearly, and I was telling myself to let go, but I had no control over my body that was now vibrating with the 60hz of the electrical current flowing through me.
I could smell my hair and flesh burning and sensed a metallic taste in my mouth.
Suddenly, I felt that I could float, and this is the moment when I saw the white light in front of me. I stopped feeling pain. It seemed that I could gravitate toward the white light without much effort, almost as if it was pulling me – beckoning me – to go to it. I could still think crystal clear. The last thought I remembered thinking in my semi-conscious state was, “I can’t go; my wife and kids need me…I can’t go!”
The next thing I knew was that I had hit the floor and landed hard on my right-hand side. I have no memory of falling. Hitting the floor either knocked the wind out of me or knocked the life back into me, but I was sucking really hard for air. Now that I was awake and conscious and could think clearly, the first thing I tried to do was stand up. I was extremely wobbly. I looked around and Miguel was standing there like a statue with his mouth agape and his eyes popping out, like he had just seen a ghost. I tried to yell, “Call 9-1-1!” but the voice that came out of my mouth was not mine; it sounded unintelligible, and strangely like someone that had a severe speech impediment.
It’s hard to pin this down, but I think the entire ordeal lasted about a minute. A minute that would forever change my life.
When I realized that my speech was compromised, I tried walking but ended up stumbling clumsily over to the wall and tried to write 9-1-1 on it. But I couldn’t write it out. My body was not fully responding to my brain. It was at this point that I remember thinking to myself, “God, thank you for letting me live,” and, in a moment of amor fati, “Well, if this is my permanent state, I’ll just have to accept it.” Suddenly, about four people from the office rushed into the file room, evidentially after hearing my body hit the floor, took one look at me, told me to lie down and someone called 9-1-1. I couldn’t even figure out how to take off my tool belt – my brain was saying one thing, but my body was doing something else – and so I lied down on the floor with tools and parts spilling out all over.
I remember not saying another word while lying on the floor uncomfortably, writhing in pain, not knowing how bad I was injured, and staring at the 2-by-2 opening in the ceiling that tried to kill me and asking myself how did I survive this? Why, did I survive this?
The paramedics got to me pretty quickly. As they were taking my vitals and connecting electrodes for the EKG machine, one of them started asking questions and I was terrified about answering them because it might validate that I was perma-fried. “Can you tell me what happened?” I hesitated for a moment, then slowly replied, “I was electrocuted by a 277-volt lighting circuit.” My voice actually sounded better, but it was still far from normal. “Were you standing on that ladder when this happened?” “Yes.” “Do you know what day this is?” “Yes, it’s Monday, December 26, 1994, the day after Christmas.” “Do you know where you are?” “Yes, I’m at the DIC Enterprises building in Burbank.” The questioning was interrupted by one of the other paramedics; “The victim is in atrial fibrillation!” “Get him ready for transport,” said the other.
They lifted me to the gurney, strapped me in, and wheeled me to the elevator. On the way to the ground floor, one of the paramedics said, “You’re lucky you’re alive!” I was loaded into the ambulance and transported to “St. Joe’s,” as the locals call Saint Joseph’s Medical Center. This was the most swerving, jarring, bouncy, uncomfortable ride I ever experienced. I started to wonder if the ambulance had wandered onto a demolition derby track. To occupy my mind while en route, I performed a self-check to determine if I had lost control of any of my extremities, and to my delight, I had no problem moving anything. At least this part of me was not perma-fried.
During the ride, they asked more questions. They needed my full name, address, phone number, emergency contact, my current health status, and if I was taking any prescription medications, etc. It wasn’t long before we were pulling into the ambulance driveway at St. Joe’s where some hospital staff members were waiting for our arrival. They quickly exchanged information and wheeled me into the ICU where they moved me from the gurney to the bed, switched EKG connections, and started an IV drip. I was still in shock, the word of which now took on an entirely new meaning to me.
“Patients heart is still in A-Fib, there’s a 1st to 2nd degree burn line across the shoulders below the back of the neck, and a 3rd degree burn on the bottom of the right forearm about the size of a quarter. The patient lost consciousness during the electrocution, but he’s lucid now.”
All of this happened before noon.
As the attending physician was examining me, he said, “Hello Mr. Freeman, it appears that you’ve had quite the morning; can you tell me what happened?” I gave him the same story I gave to the paramedics. “I see,” he replied. “Where does it hurt?” I replied in a wavering voice, “My head is pounding. My right shoulder is throbbing. All of my upper body muscles are extremely sore. I feel like I got run over by a trash truck.” “Okay, I hear you, and here’s what we’re going to do; we’re going to put you on a morphine drip to ease the pain and give you some medication to get your heart back into normal sinus rhythm, then we’re going to treat that 3rd degree burn on you arm and send you over to x-ray to make sure that you didn’t fracture your arm or shoulder. You’re lucky to be alive.” I replied, “That’s the second time this morning that I’ve been told how lucky I am, how do you mean that, exactly?” The doctor replied with, “Well, Mr. Freeman, that 277-volt shock you received has a nasty reputation of being fatal. The ones that survive are usually in such bad shape that we’re just trying to find out what’s still working. You, on the other hand, not only survived the shock, but you are also apparently in pretty good shape, considering the circumstances, and we’re going to find out what, if anything, is not working for you.” Lucky me. Just another day in the life of an electrician.
Shortly thereafter, my wife Kim walked into the ICU which raised my spirits considerably. I was in the midst of telling her what happened when the doctor came into the room. Lots of Q&A ensued. This is when the doctor told me that if the medication did not bring my heart back into normal sinus rhythm…they were going to have to use the defibrillator. Yes, that’s right; they might have to shock me again. I was not keen on the possibility of this happening.
Over the course of the next several hours, my voice went back to normal, and my body started responding to my brain.
The good news was that although the shoulder x-ray revealed some tissue damage and joint swelling, there wasn’t a fracture or break, and my body eventually responded to the heart medication and after 48-hours, my heart was back to normal sinus rhythm. After 72-hours, I was released to go home. The bad news was that the 3rd degree burn on my arm was going to need a skin graft which was performed at the Grossman Burn Center in Sherman Oaks, CA several days later.
Oddly, after only a couple of days of recovery at home, I received two visitors from my employers insurance company asking me if I was ready to go back to work. Go back to work? Seriously? This didn’t pass the smell test. I told them that my doctor hasn’t authorized me to go back to work yet, and they needed to check with him. This is when it occurred to me that the insurance company was overtly trying to rush me to go back to work. This is when I knew that I needed a professional to represent me, so I hired George Shulman, a workers comp attorney who took care of my case.
Due to the extensive muscle damage to my upper body, it took 7-months of twice weekly physical therapy sessions before I was allowed to return to work. The first couple of months of recovery were brutal. It hurt to raise my arms. It hurt to breathe deeply. It was a struggle to get dressed or take a shower. I was extremely weak. My muscles were so damaged that it limited my upper body range of motion. I had to stretch all of those muscles back out over the course of the PT sessions, which was a slow, painful process.
I’ll tell you right now that the economic reality at the time was that the workers compensation payments didn’t even come close to my normal income, and we found ourselves on the brink of bankruptcy during my recovery.
I don’t know if the law has changed since then, but at the time, I was eligible to take advantage of vocational rehabilitation training which would expire within a 5-year window. I took the required aptitude test and was told that they have never seen anyone score so highly and that I was eligible to take any of the training they had in their extensive catalog. The problem was that there was no new career that was going to put me in the same income level that I was already making, so I passed on retraining and went back into the trade.
I didn’t want to go back to work for the same electrical contractor that I was working for when I got hurt, so I called Joe Kamashian, one of my old bosses and after hearing my story he offered to rehire me for more money than I was making with the previous company. This was another lucky break.
In the meantime, my dad upgraded the old DOS computer that he bought the family a year earlier to Windows 95…and I was hooked. I learned as much as I could about PC’s, even considering computer programming. This set the wheels in motion for my interest in somehow making a living in the computer field.
By spring of 1999, I called Mr. Shulman and told him that I wanted to revisit the vocational retraining opportunity, and to my amazement, there were two new computer focused certification training paths. One was for Certified Novell Engineer (CNE) and the other was for Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) for Windows NT 4.0. At the time, Novell was the well-established 800lb gorilla in the network operating system (NOS) space, and Microsoft was a newcomer. I consulted with my dad about which one I should choose, and my dad quipped, “Go with Novell. Microsoft sucks.” Naturally, I went with Microsoft.
But this choice did not come without sacrifice or great effort.
To beat the 5-year sunset for retraining, I had to double-up on night classes at Mount Sierra College in Pasadena to finish certification in 9-months instead of the usual 1.5 years while also working full time, but I sucked it up. I had little time for any social activities. After 9-months of long days and longer nights, I pulled it off and obtained my MCSE certification on December 27, 1999, exactly 5-years and 1-day after the accident.
Incidentally, before I was fully certified, I was invited to a meeting with Dave Farguson, the GM of Center Automotive Group (BMW, and Chrysler/Jeep). I had already been moonlighting for him doing some electrical work at the dealership during a parts department remodel, so we already had a working relationship. What I didn’t know was that he was looking at a new Windows based Dealer Management System (DMS) named Carman to replace his mainframe-based Reynolds & Reynolds DMS at BMW, and ADP DMS at Chrysler/Jeep.
I was unaware that during a previous meeting with all of the departmental managers discussing the move to Carman, Dave asked the group if they knew anyone who he could hire to manage the new computers and network. My brother Scott was working as the BMW parts manager and Scott knew that I was attending night school and working toward my MSCE and threw my name into the conversation. Lucky once again.
At our meeting, Dave asked me some questions about my certification training status and when I would obtain it. I told him that I had a couple more classes to finish before taking the Pearson certification tests, but I should be done by the end of the year. This is when Dave offered me a job starting with an $80,000 salary. I was only making about $52,000 per year in the electrical trade, so this was a major bump in income for me and my family. Lucky yet again. Or was it providence?
1994 was a rough year for my family. It started with the Northridge earthquake in January and ended with a near electrocution in December. I’m lucky to be alive.
Looking back through the lens of time, this accident provided opportunities that I never would have had otherwise. It also changed my focus and my outlook on life in so many positive ways that it’s hard to define. I’ll put it this way; Being so close to death actually brought me closer to life, and something positive can come from an unfortunate circumstance.
The accident also made me more spiritual in that I now believe that there is an afterlife, but this is a complicated topic because this also validates that there must be a world of spirits. If there is a world of spirits, does this also mean that there is a heaven and a hell? If so, this also means that God and Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary and Satan are not fictional characters. If these biblical figures are not fictional characters, it means that the bible is true. If the bible is true, and God exists, I have questions. Questions like, “God; why did you create the mosquito and the tsetse fly? What purpose do they serve other than to spread blood borne diseases (that you also presumably created) that kill people in some of the most agonizing, horrific ways possible?” “Why did you take our son Travis away from us?” Questions like this flood my mind. This is my Pandora’s box.
I may be conflicted but I’m still the luckiest man on the planet.
I don’t like passive-aggressive people at all because of their indirect and often murky communication methods that are often rife with thinly veiled threats. They also think that they are cleverer than they actually are. With this in mind, I found the preceding note on my windshield this week while parked on a public street in front of a public building (power distribution substation) without any posted parking restrictions, of which I will intensely dissect.
First of all, writing in all caps is the equivalent to YELLING AT THE READER. This is a trigger from the start. It is also an extremely juvenile way to communicate with people. Calm down a pop a Prozac which I bet you have in abundance.
For one thing, I am not an employee of the redacted company name, so there’s that little nugget. Also, writing “Happy Holidays” is code for not wanting to offend any non-Christian people. The last time I checked my Gregorian calendar, December 25 still says “Christmas Day,” not, “Happy Holiday Day” which would be ridiculously redundant and meaningless. And idiotic.
Sentence 2: THIS IS A FRIENDLY REMINDER THAT YOU ARE NOT PERMITTED TO PARK IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD STREETS.
Actually, this is a not so friendly reminder because you are still yelling at me, and according to the parking signage on the street, I do not need a permit. Also, I think you meant to write, “…TO PARK ON OUR NEIGHBORHOOD STREETS.” Parking in your neighborhood street would mean that my car is encased in asphalt. Preposition choice matters! Writing “…our neighborhood streets” is a possessive statement, as if you own the street, which you don’t because it belongs to the public. In other words, the public paid for it, so the public may use it. Facts.
Sentence 3: WE ARE GOOD NEIGHBORS, HOWEVER, WE HAVE WORKERS AND OUR OWN NEIGHBORS THAT PARK IN OUR COMMUNITY.
At this point, I’m not sold on the good neighbors declaration. It also appears that they are implying that I am a bad neighbor. Additionally, and I’m not claiming to be an English expert here, but I’m pretty sure there should be a semicolon after NEIGHBORS not a comma, at least according to my word processor. Oh, and I too have workers and my own neighbors parking in my community – so what? It’s a public street. I have no beef against anyone parking on it.
Sentence 4: WE HAVE TAKEN PHOTOS OF YOUR CAR AND LICENSE PLATE, AND WE KINDLY ASK YOU TO NOT PARK HERE OR WE WILL REPORT YOU TO __________________ AND THE MANHATTAN BEACH POLICE DEPARTMENT.
So, you’re going to call 9-1-1 and SWAT me for legally parking my car? Wow! This is not a thinly veiled threat; it is an actual threat. “We” also implies that there is more than one person involved in the photo shoot, but I’m thinking this is a solo effort. This is also creepy and probably illegal. Is this person a run-of-the-mill nosey neighborhood busybody or a wannabe lawyer? Also, I don’t know the redacted person’s name you are threatening to report me to but reporting me to anybody feels so high-schoolish. I’m still not sure whether this is a Karen or a Brad who wrote this note, but I’m pretty sure you have better things to do with your apparently ample spare time than walking around the neighborhood and putting your little missives on the windshields of random cars. Or is it the only the cars that are more than 3-years old? Oh, and the police department cannot do anything to a car that is parked legally with current registration tags nor to the person with a driver’s license in good standing that parked it, whether you like it or not. Get over yourself.
Sentence 5: KIND REGARDS, YOUR MANHATTAN BEACH NEIGHBORS.
This is how you sign off with an unkindly threatening note? No name, phone number, or email address to respond to? What a chickenshit. Now I will look at everyone in this neighborhood with suspicion. I do love the tony neighborhood of Manhattan Beach, but I’m better off not being your actual neighbor because I don’t believe we would get along very well. And are you really speaking for all of the Manhattan Beach Neighbors? How many neighbors are we talking about anyway? A thousand? Ten? One? You?
The Retort
DEAR KAREN OR BRAD,
I RECEIVED YOUR NASTYGRAM…
Wait, let me start over without the yelling. I’ll use my internal NPR host voice…
Dear Karen or Brad,
I received your note on my car windshield yesterday. At first, I thought it was a parking ticket. I was relieved to find out that it wasn’t because at the time my car was certainly lawfully parked and intentionally parked in front of a public building because I am mindful not to park in front any of the multi-million-dollar houses, one of which you apparently live in. Good for you!
After reading the overtly hostile note, I immediately looked around and noticed that there were many, many other available parking spots up and down the block of the public street in question, so it’s not as if I was taking the last parking spot on the block that you may have needed to park your Tesla, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin, Ferrari, or Lamborghini that I often see excessively speeding up and down your neighborhood streets and running the stop signs. Same goes for the spoiled rich kids on their $5,000 e-bikes.
Threatening to report a person to anybody – especially the police – who has not committed any crime whatsoever is beyond ludicrous; it smacks of elitist localism of which it appears that you are gleefully engaged in. I’m pretty sure there is a lawyer somewhere amongst your ilk that would inform you that you cannot prevent anyone from parking on a public street, posted parking restrictions notwithstanding. They would also likely advise you that threatening to call the police on a law-abiding citizen that has not committed a crime a serious waste of public resources and that you may be cited and fined.
Anyway, Karen, or Brad, I will continue to park my classic 1972 Winnebago Indian RV anywhere I want to on your street. One day, if I get lucky, maybe you’ll find it parked directly in front of your house and block your view of the ocean. Lawfully parked, of course, but for no more than 72-hours at a time.
Maybe I’ll drain my black water tank while I’m there, you know, like what cousin Eddie did in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
As a general rule, I walk at lunch, unless, of course, the weather sucks. Movement is good and it gives me a chance to reset and clear my head.
I’m currently working in Manhattan Beach, CA, and there’s a path a half mile away in Hermosa Beach that goes right between the multi-story, multi-million-dollar homes and the beach that the locals call “The Strand.” It’s nice. It’s a beautiful place. Sometimes it is so clear that I can see the west end of Santa Catalina island. It’s great for people watching. I see the beautiful people on a regular basis. I also see the locals and tourists, has-beens and wannabes, beauty, beasts, homeboys with their pit bulls, and burnouts. I’m sure I’ve seen a couple of drug deals go down. It’s an interesting dichotomy of the people that live in Southern California.
Some of them are day drinking a bottle or a can of something from a brown paper bag as they sit along the low wall between the sand and the path or as they cruise along the path on a beater bicycle. Some of them are smoking weed with the warm smell of colitas rising up through the air. Hotel California reference aside, I often wonder what the people living in those beachside houses do for a living. They certainly are not flipping burgers. These are the often-derided Coastal Elites: Educated, wealthy, influential, and meddling.
There’s also a regular mix of walkers, runners, cyclists, skateboarders, and roller-bladers on The Strand. Occasionally, I see a wipeout when someone hits the loose sand that is often on the concrete path. Most of them get right back up, dust themselves off, and go on about their activity. Others act as if they are waiting for an ambulance and Larry H. Parker to show up.
I’ve recently come to the realization that not every stroller has a small child sitting in it enjoying the fresh air and sunshine or taking a nap as you would expect. Indeed, many of the strollers I see actually have a small dog (or two) and sometimes even an occasional cat. Cats and strollers seem like a recipe for, well, a catastrophe. I can barely get my cat Cheeto into his cat carrier to get him to the veterinarian and the thought of getting him into a stroller “voluntarily” for a lovely walk down The Strand would turn into a bloody mess. My blood, not Cheeto’s. It might actually work out if Cheeto is inside the cat carrier first and the cat carrier is loaded and strapped onto the stroller, but I’m not willing to get shredded to find out. You can read more about Cheeto in an earlier post here.
Now, as I walk down The Strand, I play a game inside of my head called People and Strollers: Pet or Child? I haven’t really been keeping score, but I am often surprised, especially when it is a young woman or a young couple pushing a stroller with animals inside instead of the expected little human being.
Ironically, the animals are often much cuter than the children.
msnarky 